In Today’s Deep Space Extra… James Webb Space Telescope arrives at its home at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point nearly one million miles from the Earth. The Artemis I mission will include secondary payloads, one of which will visit the smallest asteroid ever to be studied by a spacecraft.
Space Science
Webb Space Telescope arrives at L2
SpacePolicyOnline.com (1/24): The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) arrived at its destination a million miles from Earth yesterday at around 2 p.m. EST after a month-long journey. The managed critical commands that maneuvered the JWST into its destination, the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2) the observatory’s desired destination point about one million miles from Earth. The team fired the spacecraft’s thrusters for five minutes, sending the telescope into L2, a point of gravitational near-equilibrium in the Sun-Earth system where little fuel is required to maintain the orbit.
What’s next for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope after its nearly million-mile journey to destination
Space.com (1/25): On Monday, JWST slipped into orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, or L2, but there are still many boxes to tick before JWST gets down to business. “We expect the first science images from JWST to come back in about five months,” Amber Straughn, the deputy project scientist for JWST science communications, said during a webcast JWST event on Monday. The JWST team will be working on a couple of major tasks over the next five months, the first being aligning the 18 hexagonal segments that make up JWST’s 21.3-foot-wide (6.5 meters) primary mirror.
NASA will chase down the smallest asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft
CNET.com (1/20): NASA’s approaching Artemis I launch of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion crew capsule for a test flight around the Moon and back to Earth includes NEA Scout, a secondary payload that will test solar sail technology to study 2020 GE, an asteroid smaller than a school bus. The use of a sail to capture solar radiation as a source of propulsion for a deep space mission represents a first in the exploration of space. The Planetary Society launched a successful demonstration of the technology with the LightSail 2 CubeSat in 2019.
Watch Perseverance Mars rover spit out a stuck rock after choking on sample
Space.com (1/24): NASA’s Perseverance rover managed to spit out pieces of rock that had been blocking its Mars-sampling gear since late December. Although the un-choking procedure hadn’t been previously tested, the engineers on the Mars mission found it was rather “straightforward,” the team said in an earlier blog post. It involved pointing the drill containing a clogged test tube to the ground and rotating it at speed until the rocks fell out. A video of the procedure, shared on Twitter, shows the rover’s drill rotating as a small piece of rock comes out onto the red Martian surface.
Other News
Space policy, geopolitics, and the ISS
The Space Review (1/24): On the International Space Station (ISS), it is business as usual these days for the multinational crew onboard. Last week, the ISS’s two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, spent seven hours outside the ISS on a spacewalk that was covered live on NASA TV, much like those involving NASA and other western astronauts. It is not, though, business as usual down on Earth when it comes to Russia’s relationship with the U.S. and the West, with Russia threatening to invade Ukraine. The space community worries about space relations between Russia and the West in space, such as potential disruptions with European-Russian partnership on ExoMars, swapping seats between Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles, and ISS cooperation extension.
RUAG Space agrees AI partnership for satellite supercomputer
Coalition Member in The News – RUAG Space
SpaceNews.com (1/24): RUAG Space announced a partnership agreement with Sweden-based Stream Analyze to provide artificial intelligence solutions for onboard satellite software analysis. The goal is to develop an increased spacecraft computer processing capability.
Japan’s H3 rocket further delayed by engine woes
SpaceNews.com (1/24): The launch of Japan’s new H3 rocket has been postponed again as engine problems first uncovered in 2020 during qualification testing are still present. After spending almost two years wrestling with the H3’s novel LE-9 main engine, officials with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) told reporters last week that the H3 will not be ready to launch by the end of March as previously hoped. No new date has been set for a first flight, but JAXA officials said they hope it is no later than March 2023.